Birge Harrison: Teacher

"Winter Sunset" by Birge Harrison

"There are two things that Birge Harrison will talk about, even write about. The 'mood' in painting is one, and the other is the Woodstock School of Landscape Painting that he founded near his Catskill home. To be exact it is the landscape department of the Art Students' League of New York. The establishment of this successful school was a violent hobby that he rode for a period of five years, and takes an occasional canter upon today. He himself holds the successful building up of this little group of seven students to a school of over 150 serious men and women to be the most important and valuable work of his life. Although we may not entirely agree with him in this, it was certainly a notable achievement and one which is sure to prove of inestimable value to the future of American art.

I have found much of interest and value in his printed talks on landscape painting ["Landscape Painting," 1909], talks that he delivered before the Woodstock School. He has the great gift of being able to impart what he knows in vivid, picturesque, inspiring language. No one can read anything that Birge Harrison has written without realizing that he is a gifted master of the art of word painting as well as a master of the brush. It must be conceded that he has practiced as he has preached insofar as he counsels the firm adherence to one's own individual vision of nature, for no painter of this generation has stood more aloof from the general crowd of the painting fraternity, has more simply and sincerely followed the lead of his own personal genius than Birge Harrison.

His work is truly original. It is not indeed of the kind that strikes the visitor first on entering a public gallery, but it is beautiful with a far subtler and finer kind of beauty. It is rather like the modest and delicate primrose which hides itself away under a hedgerow by the wayside. Having once discovered one of his pictures amid the hurly-burly of a general exhibition, one returns to it again and again with ever-growing pleasure and delight."

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer.)